Early Greek Alchemy, Patronage and Innovation in Late Antiquity CALIFORNIA CLASSICAL STUDIES
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Early Greek Alchemy, Patronage and Innovation in Late Antiquity CALIFORNIA CLASSICAL STUDIES NUMBER 7 Editorial Board Chair: Donald Mastronarde Editorial Board: Alessandro Barchiesi, Todd Hickey, Emily Mackil, Richard Martin, Robert Morstein-Marx, J. Theodore Peña, Kim Shelton California Classical Studies publishes peer-reviewed long-form scholarship with online open access and print-on-demand availability. The primary aim of the series is to disseminate basic research (editing and analysis of primary materials both textual and physical), data-heavy re- search, and highly specialized research of the kind that is either hard to place with the leading publishers in Classics or extremely expensive for libraries and individuals when produced by a leading academic publisher. In addition to promoting archaeological publications, papyrolog- ical and epigraphic studies, technical textual studies, and the like, the series will also produce selected titles of a more general profile. The startup phase of this project (2013–2017) was supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Also in the series: Number 1: Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy, 2013 Number 2: Edward Courtney, A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal, 2013 Number 3: Mark Griffith, Greek Satyr Play: Five Studies, 2015 Number 4: Mirjam Kotwick, Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Text of Aristotle’s Meta- physics, 2016 Number 5: Joey Williams, The Archaeology of Roman Surveillance in the Central Alentejo, Portugal, 2017 Number 6: Donald J. Mastronarde, Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides, 2017 Early Greek Alchemy, Patronage and Innovation in Late Antiquity Olivier Dufault CALIFORNIA CLASSICAL STUDIES Berkeley, California © 2019 by Olivier Dufault. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. California Classical Studies c/o Department of Classics University of California Berkeley, California 94720–2520 USA http://calclassicalstudies.org email: [email protected] ISBN 9781939926128 (paperback) 9781939926135 (PDF) Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934642 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations viii Introduction 1 1. Client Scholars 9 1.1 Illiberal Scholars 10 1.2 The Scholar and the Magos 19 1.3 Client Scholars in Late Antiquity 23 2. Mageia and Paideia 26 2.1 The Term Magos and Cognates in Early Greek Texts 27 2.2 The Later History of Mageia 37 3. Representations of Scholars as Learned Sorcerers 51 3.1 Anaxilaus of Larissa 52 3.2 Apion 59 3.3 Simon 63 3.4 Pancrates 66 4. Patrons, Scholars and the Limits of Paideia 70 4.1 Plutarch 70 4.2 Heliodorus’ Ethiopica 79 4.3 Julius Africanus 84 5. Zosimus of Panopolis and Ancient Greek Alchemy 93 5.1 References to Alchemy in Late Antique Literature 94 5.2 Gold Transmutation in the Non-Alchemical Literature 100 5.3 The Soteriology of Zosimus of Panopolis 108 6. Zosimus, Client and Scholar 118 6.1 Theosebeia’s Household 119 6.2 Rivals and Scholars 122 6.3 Mageia and Chēmeia 138 Conclusion 142 Bibliography 145 Index of Passages 159 General Index 166 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to Coralie Arntz, Peter Brown, Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, Mary Hancock, Cornelia Hartmann, Donald J. Mastronarde, Christine Thomas, Chris- topher Waß and anonymous referees for commenting on previous versions of this book or individual chapters. I have also greatly benefited from discussions with Renaud Gagné, Heidi Marx, Paul-Hubert Poirier, Joseph Sanzo and Jay Stemmle. I would also like to give special thanks to Michèle Mertens and Matteo Martel- li, whose efforts provided a very useful basis for my research. Many thanks to Cal- ifornia Classical Studies for affording the opportunity to publish peer-reviewed books in open access and more particularly to Donald J. Mastronarde for his ini- tiative and generosity. Work for this book would not have been possible without the financial help of the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, Culture et Société, the UCSB History Affil- iates and the Graduate School Distant Worlds at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Uni- versität, Munich. Olivier Dufault Montreal, February 2019 vii Abbreviations A Parisinus graecus 2327. B Parisinus graecus 2325. CAAG Charles-Émile Ruelle and Marcellin Berthelot. 1887–1888. Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, 3 vols. Paris. DK Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz. 1974. Die Fragmente der Vorsokra- tiker, 3 vols. Berlin. FGrH Felix Jacoby et al. 1923–1999. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 5 parts. Berlin and Leiden. Lampe G. W. H. Lampe. 1961. Patristic Greek Lexicon. Oxford. L Laurentianus graecus plut. 86.16. LSJ Henry George Liddell et al. 1940. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford. M Marcianus graecus 299. MA Michèle Mertens. 1995. Les alchimistes grecs, Tome 4.1: Zosime de Panopolis. Mémoires authentiques. Paris. PGM Karl Preisendanz et al. 1973. Papyri Graecae Magicae, 2 vols. Teubner. P.Holm. Papyrus Holmiensis. In Robert Halleux 1981. Les alchimistes grecs, Tome 1: Papyrus de Leyde. Papyrus de Stockholm. Fragments de recettes. Paris. P.Leid. Papyrus Leidensis X. In Robert Halleux 1981. Les alchimistes grecs, Tome 1: Papyrus de Leyde. Papyrus de Stockholm. Fragments de recettes. Paris. PLRE Arnold H. M. Jones et al. 1971–1992. The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, 3 vols. Cambridge. SH Stobaei Hermetica. In Arthur D. Nock and André-Jean Festugière 1954. Corpus Hermeticum, vol. 3–4. Paris. viii Early Greek Alchemy, Patronage and Innovation in Late Antiquity Introduction The appearance of alchemical commentaries between the first and the fourth cen- tury CE provides us with an opportunity to study a striking example of innovation in ancient Greek scholarship.1 Contextualizing the alchemical commentaries of Zosimus of Panopolis (c. 300 CE)—the oldest extant alchemical author—can help us understand how this form of scholarship came to be considered worth studying and copying by ancient scholars, i.e. by professionals of paideia. The term will be taken here to mean the sum of social interactions that lead at any given time to the production and reproduction of scholarly works written in Greek and of the legitimate dispositions toward these works. As I show in this book, the legitima- tion of alchemical commentaries can be partly explained by the fact that Zosimus was a client scholar, i.e. a person who was informally hired by a patron to teach or expand upon Greek or Latin literature and/or to produce new works. Greek, or Greco-Egyptian alchemy, spelled chē-, chu-, chi- or cheim(e)ia, can be succinctly defined as the art and science of “tinctorial processes” (baphai) meant to color metals into gold or silver, to give stones or glass the appearance of pre- cious stones and to dye textiles. This fourfold division, found in the fourth-centu- ry CE papyri Leidensis X and Holmiensis, was already present in the first-century CE books of alchemical recipes attributed to Democritus.2 Some commentators presented alchemy as the art of “producing” (argurou or chrusou poiēsis/arguro-, chrusopoiia) or “preparing” (kataskeuō) gold and silver. Zosimus also described processes of transformation (including the making of gold) as a “turning” of mat- ter “inside out.” It is still unclear what Zosimus exactly meant by this but—to anticipate the argument developed in chapter 5—it can briefly be said that this 1 For overviews of ancient Greek alchemy, see Berthelot 1885, Lippmann 1919, Lindsay 1970. For introductions to alchemy, see Schütt 2000, Principe 2013, Joly 2013. Ruelle and Berthelot (1887–1888 = CAAG) is dated and incomplete but is still the best edition for many alchemical works. See also Letrouit 1995: 11–93. 2 See Mertens 1995, Martelli 2013: 13–18. 1 2 Early Greek Alchemy, Patronage and Innovation formulation was relevant to the soteriology he adopted, which he described as the extraction of the “luminous pneuma” from one’s body.3 Zosimus is the first known commentator of alchemy and the most famous name in the Greek alchemical corpus, a group of codices dated c. 1000 to 1500 CE containing the vast majority of Greek alchemical texts.4 Authors of alchemical texts can be divided into three groups. The first comprises the so-called “ancient authors” of recipes. All of these appear to be pseudepigraphic (e.g. Hermes, Ag- athodaimon, Chumēs, Maria, Moses, Democritus, etc.). Except for the remaining fragments of the Four Books attributed to Democritus, P.Holm. and P.Leid., rec- ipes attributed to the ancient alchemical authors are known only from citations found in the work of the second group of authors, the commentators (Zosimus, Olympiodorus, Stephanus et al.). This second group includes many different texts dating from the third century CE to the tenth century CE—the point at which the oldest alchemical compilation was written (the Marcianus graecus 299). Authors dated after this point can be classified in a third and last category (Michael Psel- lus, Nicephorus Blemmydes, the “anonyme de Zuretti,” etc.).5 These subdivisions are somewhat arbitrary but have the advantage of distinguishing between authors who are sometimes separated by a thousand years and who most probably wrote under very different circumstances, e.g. working on Greek translations of Arabic,6 or Latin7 recipes, assuming different theories concerning the transformation of metals,8 etc. In contrast to the majority of names found in the Greek alchemical corpus, “Zosimus of Panopolis” (or, “of Alexandria,” according to the Suda Z 168) does not appear to be pseudepigraphic. Zosimus can be dated roughly between 240 and 391 CE9 and his work provides more sociological details than any texts from the Greek alchemical corpus. This relative wealth of information makes Zosimus an interesting and underexploited source for the study of early Christianity and Her- metism. We know unfortunately little about Zosimus’ cultural background and 3 See MA 1.13–14. 4 The chief manuscripts are M = Marcianus graecus 299 (c. 1000 CE), A = Parisinus gr.